March 2013 Quick Licks

PAGE-IARISMSJimmy Page puts so many awesome layers of guitar into his songs that you might not even notice some of them, but you’d certainly
notice if they were missing. Even though they’re often mixed low, many of his parts can stand on their own perfectly well. Case in
point: the cool, arpeggiated picking part under his solo in “Achille’s Last Stand,” which is approximated here. Fingerpick, hybrid pick,
or flatpick it, and let everything ring together. It’s cooler than a broken foot!

PRECIOUS MOMENTSNick Kellie, guitarist with ’70s pop divas the Three Degrees, brings us this. “This lick is based around a C blues and mixes C major
and C minor pentatonic scales,” he says. “After the pickup notes, bar 2 starts with a Chuck Berry-style b5 double-stop. The rest of the
bar slips into the C minor pentatonic scale. Bar 3 sees the use of double-stopped thirds. Add a bluesy quarter-step bend to these for
optimum effect. In bar 4 we have two inversions of a C7, then a C6 chromatically descending to C9.”

WHOLE TONE PENTATONICS“If only more exotic scales were just
as easy to play as pentatonics,” says
reader Dee Nelson. “Well, here is an
exercise using the whole tone scale in
a pentatonic fashion. It uses mostly
two notes per string and incorporates
some double-stops, which are
also typical of pentatonic licks. The
really cool thing about this phrase—
and whole tone riffs in general—is
that the exact same patterns can be
moved around the fretboard in whole
steps, or two-fret intervals. Try starting
this exercise on the 12th, 14th,
16th fret, etc.”